Eternity Uncensorable?

[Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM]

Adam Back <aba at dcs.ex.ac.uk> writes:

> Mark Grant <mark at unicorn.com> writes:
>
> > so all that a government need do to censor a particular site is to
> > scan for those messages and issue cancels. Sure, your site and those
> > upstream may not accept such messages, but potentially they can
> > still wipe out a large fraction of the system or at least force
> > users to change their eternity URLs on a regular basis.
>
> Two comments on this:
>
> - I understand cancels are ignored a lot of places, due to problems with
>   censorous people, and pranksters issuing tons of forged cancels.
>   These censorous people are actually doing us a big favour because it
>   is their actions which has led to the widespread policy of ignoring
>   cancels.

Yep. (I hope my making available an easy-to-use program for foring cancels
helped a little too, he he he.)

>   However this is going on other peoples information.  I don't have
>   any figures for how widespread the practice of configuring news to
>   ignore cancels is.

Major ISPs (America Online, Netcom, Earthlink..) all ignore cancels.
More precise numbers would be interesting.

> However I'm not sure having passphrases is that good of an idea,
> because it'll be furtively passed around amongst the community of the
> person who submitted the documents, but that can always leak out.

I can't think of a clever way to use public keys (and don't think this
is a good idea anyway)

> Longer term perhaps some of Ross Anderson's more advanced ideas can be
> added, as discussed by Ryan Lackey in the thread entitled "distributed
> data store, a la eternity".

Adam, you're doing a great job. Can I buy you a dinner when I'm in London?

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps